Which side are you on?

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Fox, Christopher

CHRISTOPHER Fox salutes a prodigious contribution to the late-twentieth-century piano repertoire

IT IS SOME TIME since The Musical Times included CD reviews, and if this article is used as a precedent then it may well be some time before CDs feature in these pages again, since there are few record companies likely to treat a living composer as generously as Nonesuch have done in anthologising Frederic Rzewski's piano music in this seven-disc set. Nonesuch's commitment to the project was probably encouraged by the fact that in Rzewski they had a composer who is a prodigious pianist as well as a prodigious composer; nevertheless they have done him proud. Rzewski's performances have all the authority one would expect, although the rather steely sound that he and his recording team have adopted does not make an extended exposure to these CDs an especially grateful listening experience. The CDs are imaginatively compiled, with each disc presenting either a single work or a collection of inter-related works (if economy of manufacturing had been the priority the music could have been squeezed on to rather fewer CDs; the last disc, for example, contains only 32' 42" of music), and they are presented in slimline jewel cases so that the complete boxed set, while chunky, is a manageable handful. The accompanying booklet has notes on each piece by the composer, followed by a typically insightful essay on the music as a whole from Christian Wolff, a longstanding friend and colleague, and the whole package is illustrated with austere blackand-white photographs of Rzewski, of his manuscript strewn piano, and of wintry, unpeopled landscapes. Serious music, seriously represented.

Above all these CDs offer an opportunity for listeners to get to know a considerable amount of music by a composer much of whose music is still relatively unfamiliar. The four North American ballads, originally written in 1978 and 1979 for the late Paul Jacobs, have been widely performed although often individually rather than as a set, and the spectacular set of variations, The people united will never be defeated, written in 1975 for Ursula Oppens, has enjoyed a considerable success both in concert and on recordings. Rzewski's Nonesuch recording is his third account of the piece (an early, long deleted LP for Vanguard was followed by a CD version for hat ART), and there have been other acclaimed recordings by Stephen Drury (New Albion), Marc-Andre Hamelin (Hyperion), Ursula Oppens (Vanguard) and Yuji Takahashi (00 Discs). But the other works presented here are much less well known. Nor is this the complete Rzewski piano music: Christian Wolff estimates in his liner notes that the Nonesuch collection offers about three-quarters of Rzewski's piano output in the last twenty-five years.

To begin at the beginning, Disc One presents the North American ballads, each drawing its title and musical substance from a song associated with political struggle in North America - `Dreadful memories', `Which side are you on?', `Down by the riverside' and `Winnsboro Cotton Mill blues' -- followed by `The housewife's lament, variations on the nineteenth-century song originally written as a harpsichord piece in 1980. Disc Two has more recent works: Mayn Yingele (1988-89), variations on a Yiddish tune; Rzewski's four-minutes-and thirty-three-seconds-long memorial for John Cage, A life, from 1992; and Fougues (1994), a fantasy in twenty-five fifty-second-long sections. Disc Three offers the Fantasia (1999) and the three-movement Sonata (1991). Discs Four and Five introduce the first four parts of Rzewski's work-in-progress The road, Disc Six is devoted to The people united, and Disc Seven to De profundis (1992), a melodrama in which the pianist accompanies himself while variously speaking, declaiming and intoning passages from the letters which Oscar Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas during the poet's imprisonment in Reading Gaol.

Rzewski has a long standing reputation as a politically-engaged composer. Born in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1938, he studied music at the universities of Harvard and Princeton before coming to Europe in 1960, initially on a Fulbright Scholarship to study with Dallapiccola in Rome and then as a freelance composer, pianist and improviser, most notably with the group MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), which he founded in the mid-sixties with fellow American expatriates Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum. In the ideologically charged climate of the late 1960s Rzewski began to look for ways in which his music could more explicitly articulate his sympathies with the victims of oppression. In the works that followed he allied himself with the victims of injustice in US prisons (Coming together and Attica), with the people of Chile in their struggle against the CIA-backed overthrow of the Allende government (The people united will never be defeated) and with the American labour movement (North American ballads), in each case incorporating material that directly connected it to the people whose causes he was championing. Coming together and Attica (both 1972) are scored for speaking voice and variable ensemble, with the speaker declaiming texts taken from the letters of prisoners killed during the riots in the New York State Prison at Attica in 1971; The people united takes as the subject of its thirty-six variations Sergio Ortega's tune `El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido', a rallying call for the Chilean opposition, while the North American ballads have at their heart the tunes mentioned earlier.